


Surrender

by Iamprongsie



Category: Star Wars - All Media Types, Star Wars: The Clone Wars (2008) - All Media Types
Genre: Angst, Barriss is an inquisitor, Canonical Character Death, Character Death, Gen, Heavy Angst, In which the author hides erratic writing style, Luminara POV, barriss isn't doing very well here oops, by writing a very erratic and off the rails character, did you ever wonder how Luminara died?, look i'm sorry, well I did and this happened
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-06-26
Updated: 2019-06-26
Packaged: 2020-05-20 04:12:59
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence, Major Character Death
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,049
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/19369543
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Iamprongsie/pseuds/Iamprongsie
Summary: Barriss turns eyes of fractured blue onto her, curled into herself in that evil uniform. “I didn’tmeanto Fall,” she mutters, “I just… I just sauntered vaguely downwards. Talked to the wrong people. I didn’t mean to kill anyone. It just happened. It was for the greater good, I swear!”





	Surrender

_Of course it comes to this,_ Luminara thinks as she frantically runs around a corner, lightsaber raised and deflecting bolts from the clo- _no no don’t go there, don’t think about Gree’s body still on the ground, her own men firing on her, no no **no**_ \- the stormtroopers chasing her. She’s managed to survive two years after the order, stealing scraps where she can, taking random jobs, always moving in case someone sees the wanted posters from the core and puts two and two together between the Jedi Master on the poster and the scarred Mirialian waiting on their table. 

The hum of her lightsaber in her ear is a familiar balm, reminding her of long hours spent training her padawan, sparring with Kenobi and Quin and Siri and the rest of her childhood friends. It helps calm her as she vaults a low wall in her long skirt, narrowly missing taking someone’s arm off. More blaster fire follows in her wake and she thrusts an arm out, pulling aside boxes and other paraphernalia with the Force. It feels like she’s stretching out a long disused muscle, painful and blissful all at once. She’s shut herself off for so long, even the thrill of the chase - something she usually hates and tries to avoid - lights a fire in her blood and sings to her very soul. 

She doesn’t realise her mistake before it’s too late. 

The wall she’s vaulted over leads to a dead end, with houses fencing her in on three sides. She’s trapped, she can’t get out the way she came. The troopers are standing there, pointing their blasters at her. 

Luminara Unduli does not surrender. She once commanded the 41st Elite Battalion, some of the best troops in the GAR (bar the 501st and the 212th, but Kenobi and Skywalker were laws unto themselves, and their men reflected that). She was a Jedi Master. She never surrendered if she could help it, the separatists always bowed to _her_. 

And here she is, lowering her deactivated lightsaber to the ground and putting her hands up, waiting for execution. 

The troopers make way for someone, just as Luminara comes to terms with her imminent death. The figure is tall, dressed in the uniform of the Inquisitors, a helmet obscuring their face. One of the troopers speaks in a painfully familiar voice, even through the modulator. 

“Sir, we found her running away. What are your orders?”

The helmet goes up, and Luminara finds herself staring into her former padawan’s face. 

“Barriss?”

“Hold your fire. My master and I have some things to talk about,” Barriss says, circling her like a shark. The troopers nod and step back, until Barriss flicks her fingers violently and they move back into the town proper. 

“What is there to talk about?” Luminara snaps. “ _You_ left. _You_ made that choice. I have nothing to say to you anymore, Barriss.”

Barriss grabs Luminara’s lightsaber and steps back, inspecting the worn metal. “The Jedi were corrupt,” she responds coolly, latching the saber onto her belt. Luminara winces, and she can’t tell whether it’s the sight of her saber on a sith apprentice’s belt, or the pain in her arms from holding them above her head. “You can put your arms down, it’s obvious you’re unarmed,” the younger woman says. “Besides - I was always able to beat you in hand to hand.”

Luminara can’t help the sigh of relief she lets out as she lowers her arms and rubs feeling back into them. Barriss is still circling her, until she stops abruptly and pulls Luminara into a hug. 

What. 

“What’s going on?” she asks, praying that Barriss isn’t about to slide a lightsaber between her ribs. Barris just hugs tighter, her body beginning to shake.

“I’m so sorry,” she mutters into Luminara’s shoulder, and Luminara pats her tentatively on the back. If someone this morning had told her that she’d have a crying Inquisitor in her arms, one that she used to train, she’d have thought that that person had ingested some funny deathsticks. 

“What? Barriss, what is this?” 

Barriss stops hugging her and steps back, furiously wiping tears from her eyes. “I’m sorry, master. I want to come home.”

“There is no home, anymore. _You_ saw to that,” she responds coldly, and watches her former padawan reel back as if she’d slapped her. 

“It was for the greater good! The war had to stop!” Barriss yells, pacing. “I had to get Ahsoka out of there, I was coming back for you!”

“You Fell, Barriss. You committed a crime, you let your emotions get the better of you, you blew up the Temple! I can’t forgive that,” and Luminara trails off just as the heavens open and the rain comes down. 

Barriss turns eyes of fractured blue onto her, curled into herself in that evil uniform. “I didn’t _mean_ to Fall,” she mutters, “I just… I just sauntered vaguely downwards. Talked to the wrong people. I didn’t mean to kill anyone. It just happened. It was for the greater good, I swear!” 

“What greater good, Barriss? Where is it now?” Luminara is so, so tired, and Barriss is still pacing like a caged animal. “What do you even want from me?” she asks, dreading the answer. 

“Forgiveness,” is the answer that’s given. 

“You know I can’t offer that,” Luminara responds. 

“What _can_ you offer?” 

“An apology,” she says, softly. “I failed you, Barriss. I’m sorry.”

“Sorry isn’t enough!” Barriss howls, and rips her helmet off. The rain immediately plasters her hair to her head. “I tore apart the temple! I framed my best friend! And nothing ever came from it, nothing.”

“I cannot offer forgiveness, my padawan.”

“Not for anything?” and Barriss looks so broken, so _wrong_ in that uniform and that saber and the way she holds herself and everything about her former padawan looks so beaten down that Luminara wants to offer her the world again, tell her everything’s going to be alright just like she did when Barriss was twelve and scared of the thunder. 

Luminara pauses. Barriss takes that opening and steps closer, hands spread as if in supplication. 

“Come with me, at least. I got Ahsoka out, I can get you away from the Empire, into the outer rim. We can be a family again! We’ll be safe, I have friends there. Please, Luminara. I’m sorry.”

Barriss’ eyes look even more fractured, blue and gold mixing together and apart, until one eye is blue and one is that awful awful sith gold she’s seen only in her nightmares, fueled by Obi-Wan’s drunk ramblings after Qui-Gon’s death and stories of old, of the Sith Wars and Revan, of Plagueis and his apprentice. 

“No more fighting?” Luminara asks, wary of the fact that Barriss is very armed and this could go wrong in so many ways. “If I leave with you, we won’t be followed by your troops? They’ll stand down?”

“They are loyal,” Barriss promises. “They’ll do what I say. And there won’t be any more fighting. I promise.”

“I’ll think about it,” Luminara replies, but she’s hardly in a place to bargain. 

“There is one thing, though,” Barriss says. “I still need your forgiveness.”

Luminara would give her padawan the universe if she asked, but she cannot offer her forgiveness. The wound is still too raw, the memories of the dead jedi whispering in her mind, the screams of those affected by the bomb still ring in her ears. 

Luminara Unduli always sticks to her decisions. 

“I’m sorry,” she mutters, and tries to walk away. She knows she won’t get past the troopers still milling around, but anything is better than looking at the broken form of her padawan. 

Barriss throws an arm out and stabs Luminara in the side. A red blade retracts into itself and Luminara falls to the ground in a force hold as Barriss puts her lightsaber back onto her belt. 

“Why can’t you forgive me? I was working for good!” she yells. Luminara struggles against the force hold, but Barriss has always been strong with the force and it still obeys her. Her side feels like it’s on fire, and she resists the temptation to look down and check the damage. Barriss is dangerous now, and she can’t afford not to keep an eye on her. 

“No, you were working for what you thought was good,” Luminara responds, keeping one eye on the hand that’s shifting ever closer to her own lightsaber. 

“It was good!” Barriss hisses, keeping one hand up to push Luminara down with the force as she grabs Luminara’s saber in the other. “ _I_ helped to stop the war. _I_ got Ahsoka out! _I_ opened the Council’s eyes! I showed them what the war did!”

“You did it through the dark,” Luminara reminds her. “There were other options! Why didn’t you talk to me? I could have helped.”

“Helped _how_?” Barriss snarls, circling Luminara’s frozen form again. “More meditation? Talk to Master Plo? Spend more time on the front, watching our men die? Or more time in the halls of healing, watching my _family_ die?”

Luminara struggles against her bonds again, and another wave of fire rolls down her side. 

“I-”

“We all know that wouldn’t have worked, _master_. You would have done all of those things, and you did, and it was too late.”

The lightsaber ignites. Luminara watches it and frantically struggles against her bonds, but Barriss is too strong in the force and she can’t move. 

“I’ll ask you one more time. Do you forgive me for what I did?” she asks, waving the blade from side to side. “Hmmm, it’s been a while since I wielded one of these pretty blades,” she mutters. “So elegant, so…” 

Barriss turns to Luminara, watching her face.

“... deadly,” Barriss finishes. The green blade lights up the side of her face, illuminating her tattoos. Both eyes are yellow now, Luminara’s worst nightmares come to life on her padawan’s face. 

“Barriss, please-”

She lied she lied she’s not ready to die even though the last two years have been _hell_ she can still do good, still bring the Order back.

“What, master? Please spare you? Forgive you? Kill you?”

The lightsaber moves to Luminara’s chin and settles in the hollow of her throat. The heat of the saber stings her face, and the scar on her cheek twinges with the memory of a blaster bolt grazing her face. 

“I can’t forgive you,” she croaks, careful of the saber at her throat. 

Barriss smiles coldly. “You will, or you die.”

Luminara closes her eyes and remembers happier times, the hum of her ship beneath her feet with Barriss and Gree walking alongside her, the exhilaration she felt after a spar with one of her friends, the day she took Barriss as her padawan, the day she was knighted, the day she and Quin and Siri and Bant and Obi-Wan made their first lightsabers, the first time she touched the force and felt it touch back, her senses opened to an entirely new world. 

When she opens them again, Barriss is still holding the lightsaber to her throat. Luminara tilts her head back, eyes cold and calculating. She’s not scared now, she’s not afraid to die. She won’t even class this as surrender. No, to surrender now would be to offer forgiveness, and Luminara Unduli does not surrender and she still can’t forgive Barriss, even though she still loves her like a daughter. 

“Do your worst, padawan.”

Barriss shrieks in rage and drives the saber through Luminara’s throat, which burns and blisters until she can no longer breath and she’s clutching at the hole in her throat and spasming and trying to draw breath, and she can’t even scream her pain out to the rest of the galaxy. She somehow always knew that Barriss would be the one to kill her, ever since the trial where Luminara’s failings as a master had been exposed - she hadn’t noticed her padawan’s steady decline, hadn’t noticed anything around her.

She registers one final thing before her eyes close and her last gasping breaths fill her lungs. Barriss is standing there in shock, Luminara’s lightsaber sitting deactivated on the ground. 

In that moment, she forgives Barriss.

This is the worst surrender possible.

**Author's Note:**

> yes hi I'm sorry feel free to screech about me in the comments of this or at my [Tumblr](https://pidgeonkatie.tumblr.com/)


End file.
